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We are looking for a home in Montgomery county. I was told by a realtor that a home we are interested in would be required to hookup to the sewer system in two years. (Keep in mind the home needs septic repairs now) A $6500 sewer hookup fee seems outrageous.Anyone ever heard of this? I can't seem to find a county website that has any answers. All of the websites I can find are inadequate in almost every way. Can't even find the address on the county tax collector site. Anyone out there work for the county? Thanks in advance. Let me get back on the turnip truck.

Sewage hookup $6500--- WHAT?
We are looking for a home in Montgomery county. I was told by a realtor that a home we are interested in would be required to hookup to the sewer system in two years. (Keep in mind the home needs septic repairs now) A $6500 sewer hookup fee seems outrageous.Anyone ever heard of this? I can't seem to find a county website that has any answers. All of the websites I can find are inadequate in almost every way. Can't even find the address on the county tax collector site. Anyone out there work for the county? Thanks in advance. Time to get back on the turnip truck.

I think my parents had to pay $1200 for a sewer & water tap when they were annexed into Myrtle Beach in the late 1960s and the city ran municipal lines through the neighborhood. They were outraged at the price but had to do it. Given the inflation, $6500 is probably not that bad.

Ahhhh Inflation calculator says this is $7347 now so you are getting a decent deal.

It's referred to as many different names in different areas: impact fees, capital recovery fees, connection fees, rip-off fee (j/k...kind of). In any case, they are all effectively the same fee. If you're connecting to a sewer collection service (whether it's commercial or municipal), your "poo" is heading on down to a "poo plant." These wastewater treatment plants are extremely expensive to build, operate, and maintain. As a result, the entity that owns the plant charges a fee to everyone that sends waste to it. The plant is designed, built, and permitted with federal agencies to have a maximum capacity...sort of like a maximum number of seats in a theater allotted by the fire marshal. The sewer plant sells each seat at an equally distributed price based on how much waste a typical residential house produces (usually called an ERU, or Equivalent Residential Unit). These fees go toward maintaining and upgrading the treatment plant, and eventually building a bigger one if and when it is ever needed. Places that produce more waste pay a larger fee based on the fact that they put out more than a typical residential house (think of a restaurant...not just poo, but water from cleaning dishes, etc. is also sent to the plant, so they put a lot of waste down the line and occupy much more capacity at the treatment plant than a regular house).

The fees are sharp and can sting if they're not rolled into the cost of your house. If the house is hooked up to a sewer system from the beginning, the cost of the fee is rolled into the cost of the house. The developer still had to cut a check to the treatment plant for whatever amount was calculated (one fee for each house basically), and you can believe that the fee is rolled into the initial selling price of the house...and continually rolled into the cost of the house for the rest of it's life, forever "owning" a seat at the treatment plant.

Without this sort of fee, a treatment plant could easily be overrun with new development (producing more poo) and the risk of the plant being over-capacity would be great. This fee allows the owner of the plant to say "yes, we have room for your new development" or "no we don't." The last thing you want to have is a sewer plant lacking capacity. The waste water doesn't just magically disappear...it overflows right into the stream or river that's nearby the treatment plant...completely untreated. Yes, gross...and very expensive in terms of fines issued by the government when it happens (not if). There was a story a year or so ago about some treatment plant operators in Denver, NC that were forging water sample results for the water being discharged into the stream near their plant. The actual results were through the roof with fecal bacteria and other unpleasantries, so the operators used bottled water as their samples! It wasn't until people began wondering why the stream smelled funny and had some odd looking "algae" in it that pieces started to fit together. The operators were hit with a criminal conviction and the town of Denver was cited for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

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